I first saw John Clancy’s Fatboy at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The play mocks the death of modern theatre from the beginning when the title character opens the play by bellowing; “MOTHERFUCK! Cocksucking fuck-headed motherfucking FUCKS!” The grotesque, squalid clown figure of Fatboy, as he reads the newspaper from his worn-out lazy-boy in his filthy kitchen, discovers that the world has, yet again, failed to notice his supreme magnificence. Although he is an unemployed writer living in abject squalor with his shrewish wife, he feels entitled to celebrity. The play chronicles his bloody assent to penultimate power. John Clancy’s play interlaces numerous theatrical styles from absurdism to surrealism, vaudeville, clowning, epic theatre and even Shakespearean tragedy. Clancy parodies classic tragic structure by chronicling the rise and fall of a literally and figuratively "larger than life" character. The seventy-minute sometimes comic, sometimes political and always satirical assault on the institution of marriage, the politics of imperialism, and the vulgarity of American consumerism won an Edinburgh Festival First during its premier run in 2004. Clancy’s 2007 revival of Fatboy at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe earned him the first Edinburgh International Festival Award which included a $10,000 grant to develop a new play titled Captain Overlord’s Folly Or The Fool’s Revenge: an attempt at a battle and an honorable truce. Clancy Productions will stage a reading of this new play in Edinburgh in August 2008.

 

His 2006 Obie Award for sustained excellence in directing of his own plays as well as plays by CJ Hopkins and Brian Parks, including Americana Absurdum, Horse Country, Cincinnati, and screwmachine/eyecandy speak to his importance to the Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway Theater scene. Many critics consider this veteran actor, director and playwright, to be a leader in alternative or experimental theater. While Clancy resists the idea that he is creating a new form of theater or conducting experiments, he nevertheless remains a renegade, a rebel, and a renaissance man in his aim to produce raw theater without pretence or illusion. While his work has won numerous awards and has taken him and his company around the world, he still believes that a great deal of twenty-first century theater is “completely fascist” and “boring.” Clancy’s work emphasizes the fact that his plays takes place in a theater and he expects his artists and collaborators to take the work on as a political and ethical responsibility.

Writer/Director John Clancy

 

John Clancy became the founding artistic director of the critically acclaimed Off-Off Broadway Theater, The Present Company, in September 1993. The company debuted with his play Secret Agent Man. In 1997 he co-founded and became the artistic director of the New York International Fringe Festival. His plays have won awards at the American Shorts Contest and the San Francisco Playwrights Center DramaRama, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and have been short-listed for the Julie Harris Playwriting Award and the Actors Theatre of Louisville Heideman Award.           

 

John Clancy was born in St. Louis in 1963 and he sees himself in his youth as a “full blown Midwestern kid.” He attended public schools and played football until his expulsion in eleventh grade. He eventually graduated from a Catholic school and earned a BA from Oberlin College, where he decided to pursue a career in acting. Before being kicked-out of Southern Methodist University’s MFA acting program, he met his future wife and actor Nancy Walsh. The couple moved to New York City in 1990 to pursue their acting careers. Soon Clancy started writing and directing. 

 

I conducted this interview in Clancy’s Lower East Side apartment on June 20, 2008. Nancy Walsh, partner in Clancy Productions, has collaborated with Clancy for seventeen years in many productions and in marriage, and also participated in the interview.

 

Anthony Hostetter (AH):  T-Bone Burnett, who produced the soundtrack for Oh Brother Where Art Thou, said on NPR recently that "The press had completely abdicated its role as the guardian of the democracy," because he believes it is the artists’ responsibility to tell people what’s going on.

 

John Clancy (JC):  It’s really true. And, frankly, the theater has given up. In Mike Daisey’s How Theater Failed America*, which is about a lot of other things, but the truth of it is, it’s just that - we gave up, man. We became corporations. The little theater movement was extraordinary. Then it became “corporatized”. The Ford Foundation bought it and then rich folks gave money and they began to play to the rich. 

 

This is what’s killing me, I remember saying this to a group of Rowan [University Theater] students. I said, “Look, we are grouped into what is called alternative theater or it’s called experimental, let me tell you we are not trying to create anything new. These are not experiments working towards some new form. We are actually trying to get back to what it was,” by brushing away all of this detritus and shit that we think is the theater, that we think is necessary for the theater. That’s everything, that’s the set, opening night, that’s the red curtain, that’s all that kind of shit. The idea that our highest aim in the theater is to imitate, perfectly. You know, the more that a writer can imitate speech patterns, the more that an actor can imitate some person, the more that a designer can imitate a living room – that’s the mark of excellence? No. Show me something I have never seen before. Show me the truth. Show me like, “oh, that’s what it’s like, that’s what it feels like to be in my world.” Again, the guys did that. A Streetcar Named Desire, that’s not a real play. Everything O’Neill wrote, they are not realistic plays. 

*(How Theater Failed American, was written and performed by Mike Daisey Off Broadway and at the Theater Communications Group Conference in Denver in June 2008. The central theme in this monologue centers on the idea that the regional theater system is suffering from depression because it lacks consistent personal relationships due to New York actors and artists coming into town for six-week contracts, while local artists remain underutilized. Patrons are willing to fund new buildings, yet there are little funds for staff and often these buildings set empty)

 

AH:  Yes, when I talk about Glass Menagerie, I ask the students, “where did it take place?” They say, “St. Louis.” No, it takes place in a bar somewhere, in his mind . . .

 

JC:  Exactly, it takes place in a drunken reverie, it’s in his mind, and where does it finally take place? This is my standard thing, in every printed copy of any play I write “the play takes place on stage.” It’s just simple. 

 

AH:  So, at what point did you realize that the theater needed to be swept clean of, as you said, “the detritus we think is theater”?

 

JC:  On Ludlow, there was what is now “Pianos” on the corner of Ludlow and Stanton Streets, “Pianos,” which is this really fucking expensive bar/restaurant. Well, back in the early nineties, it was the Piano Store. It was a store that sold pianos. In the back room there was this nightclub.  It was this speakeasy, illegal little bar set-up. It was for people who worked in bars and when they closed they would have a place to go. The guy who produced the thing said, “I need a reason why people are hanging out here late, otherwise the cops are going to be on to me.” 

 

So we would start shows around ten-thirty, Fridays and Saturdays. It was a bar, there was this weird little balcony set up, the whole place wasn’t more than forty by twenty feet. It was this tiny little place, but really high, there was two-stories and you would go up these stairs to this balcony to look down, there were a couple of tables, people would sit up there. You could probably pack it with fifty to sixty people. No stage, no real lighting, no equipment. Hash brownies at the bar. You know, five bucks for a big hash brownie. Amazing. We did our early work there. We did Solo for Spoon and Bird Cage and Anyone, and The Emperor’s Shorts and Falling Out, we did all these funny, little weird plays that I had written. We would say “okay, now here’s the play.” These people are having a drink, and saying, “who the fuck are these guys looking at us,” so you had to be more interesting than the bar. You had to hold the bar, you had to stop them and deal with the audience right there. It was, of course, and I never will forget the realization a couple of years later, when we found a theater and said, “what happened, why is this so boring now?” It was because we left the fucking bar and went into a theater! What were we thinking? And in a way, it’s always been an attempt to get back to that. And our work has done that, but it was this incredible round about way of getting back to the bar, where people want to be there, you know.

 

AH:  It’s the way it used to be in the Elizabethan theater.

 

Nancy Walsh (NW):  Shakespeare had it right.

 

JC:  Exactly! It makes your work more interesting. You have to work harder.

 

AH: I always tell the students that when Wagner built his theater, he made the whole audience face the stage, he turned off the house lights, so you had no choice but to watch what was happening on stage. You didn’t have to work for the attention any more.

 

JC:  Exactly! And its completely fascist, completely, master-slave and it kills it. It kills the vibe.  So for us, it’s an eternal question of, “why did we stay in the theater?” There is this sense of how are we going to make the theater alive again.

 

AH:  Yet, you tend to produce in theater spaces . . .

 

JC:  I guess the reason why we use the theater is mostly because of Brian Parks and CJ Hopkins, the two writers I initially was so fucking lucky to run into . . . Their work is really demanding. It’s linguistically demanding, it’s doing interesting things, it changes rhythmically, its way too fast, and if you don’t have a focused environment the work is not going to spring to life. I just believe in their work very much, so I need the lights focused here and I need the folks to listen, the list goes on. 

 

NW:  Of course, we hate to go to the theater.

 

JC:  I’ve got to go to the theater tonight. Its like, God damn it! I asked the guy, where is it and how long is it. He said, “Its at Under St. Marks,” which is right up there, “and its less than ninety minutes. You should be out by nine-twenty.” I said, “thank you man.” I’m telling you, I like the kid, the work is getting good reviews, but I’m going to drag my ass up there and I’m probably going to have three drinks before I do, just to sort of sit there and get through it. And it might be great, but . . .

 

AH:  But why do we hate going?

 

JC:  Because its boring!

 

NW:  Most of it is just dreadful.

 

JC:  It’s boring, it’s pretentious, its, you know . . . it’s no fun. Cecil O’Neal had that great thing, where it’s like, “Look . . .

 

NW:  Cecil O’Neal was a really, really good teacher that I had at SMU. He said, “You know, so you are going to ask me to get dressed, skip dinner or have diner after the show, get into my car and drive to a place, find parking, get the tickets, pay the money, get in seats, sit down and I will watch your show. Give me a good reason.”

 

JC:  You better give me a good reason.

 

NW:  To do all of that. And the good thing was, he said, “I don’t see this very often, you have to be prepared to say this is why you are here. Come along with me.”

 

JC:  I may have misheard it, but I thought that one of the great things he said was, “you are going to do all that. You better show me something more interesting than I could see at the bar.” And often times at the bar you overhear a conversation . . . wow! Check that out, did you hear that? So if you ask them to come all this way to just overhear a conversation, between a bunch of people. If you ask me to do all that shit and then you are going to fucking ignore me? I’m right here man! I could be at home. We are all right here and you are going to ignore me? You don’t have to say, “Hey folks, how are you doing tonight” and actually deal with the people like stand up, but you better be totally aware that they are in the room. They better know you know they are in the room and you better be clear about why you have gathered them.

 

AH:  How do you let your audience know that you know they are there, that we are all gathered together?

 

JC:  Actors in this country are never asked to take the responsibility. They just create in a room and replicate or mimic. But as a responsibility to our work, starting with Hopkins’s work, this is a social act, this is a political-ethical act that we are doing. This is not an entertainment, in that sense. It is entertaining, but when Hopkins is writing it’s actually an ethical test. It is for everyone in the room, including the actor, especially the actor.

 

David Calvitto and Ben Schneider are solid actors, (fucking marvelous, solid actors), but getting these guys to accept: look, you cannot say this line, you cannot deliver this monologue; unless you are speaking to yourself and you are really speaking to this room. You have to take the authority . . . I just went through this same sort of conversation with Matt Oberg, in The Event, “look you have to take the authority in the room to say these things.” That is something that a lot of artists, a lot of actors are not comfortable with. Because they are thinking, “I’m preaching.” We are not preaching, we are not the people who preach. 

 

Again, it was Hopkins that taught me this. He explained to me the difference between shamans and priests. You know, if you are a priest, then you are saying, “I am separate, I have a direct relationship to the holy.” All priests are separate from society and “I will deal with the forces.” Where as, a shaman is not. A shaman is just a guy next door who happens to be good at talking about the dreams and whatever. But when it’s done, when you don’t need me to be a shaman, then I’m just the guy next door, who is, you know, who’s an asshole or is funny or is whatever. So being a shaman has nothing to do with Richard Schechner, and that sort of tribalism sense of “oh, we can get naked and jump around and bang on drums.” That is not our shamanism, that is not our religion, in America, in the 21^st century. We are honoring America in the twenty-first century, speaking to America.

 

NW:  But Barack Obama may be president In January.

 

AH:  Which is to suggest, that as a shaman, you could end up not being needed anymore . . .

 

JC:  There is that element too. We were just talking about that. In a way, we are like cancer doctors. We need cancer. If you cure the cancer in this country, then we are out of business. I’ve got three or four plays sitting on my desk, and everyone says, “We’ve got to get it done before November.” But there are only so many dates . . .

 

I was talking to Ian Forrester, who is going to direct Fatboy in L.A. and I said, “it’s not about Bush or Clinton or Obama or McCain”, but I said, “but you know what, I will probably give you a new line, about the audacity of hope or something.” Because power is still power and whether Obama can or will immediately release everyone at Guantanamo (and in fact, he can’t because he is such a hopeful candidate). I pray to God that he is going to be the President of the United States of America, but that is not a job in isolation. And if you are a young, black man, you have to pony up to some of the old shit. This is a huge progression, but it is not a revolution. So therefore a lot of the old stuff will be there and we will continue. Unless I see Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney in jail, I’m not satisfied.

 

AH:  Fatboy is loaded with vulgar language, and I started looking for information on what people thought about vulgar language on stage. I found a discussion on the difference between the vulgar and the sublime, which are polar terms. Many people believe that theater and art should be sublime. I think what you are doing is theater that is vulgar.

 

JC:  Yes, and mundane . . .

 

AH:  I don’t think mundane is the right word, because when you think of vulgar, I remember my grandmother saying, “don’t be vulgar.” She wasn’t talking about language but about being common or ugly or ordinarily, which is what vulgar actually means. But it seems that theater, which is about life and having living people on stage is, by definition, vulgar.

 

NW:  Of course it is.

 

JC:  Of course, its immediate, you are watching someone dying. I think it was Herbert Blau who said, “whenever you watch somebody walk on stage, you are watching someone dying.” That is part of the fascination. You are watching disintegration; you are also watching the impossible task, which is so wonderful. You are watching a fellow human being daring to transcend, daring to become larger, and they are going to fail. I was telling the actors, it’s not about talent, it is about courage. When we are sitting there, we applaud talent but we stand for courage. We will rise to our feet for courage. We see you go beyond, certainly beyond what I could do, but we actually see you go beyond what you can do and you know that and you are exhausted. Screwmachine is a great example. It is actually physical. It’s incarnate, seeing Nan on her hands and knees not being able to even speak anymore. Bill is flopping himself about and we are worried for him physically. Dave is still talking ninety-miles an hour and you are like, “fuck!” It is an experience of carnality. 

 

Sublime, at the beginning of the twentieth century, sure. It was a much more beautiful time. There was still a sense of art being a little more in the drawing room, still being the property of the intellectuals, with the lovely people, the good people. So you could get to sublime. But for us, the only way you are going to get to the door of the sublime is to walk through the slaughterhouse. You have to walk right through the killing floor to get there. If you don’t, then you are never going to get there. Novelists like Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer who went through World War II, talked about language and the vulgarity in that sense of the word. Mailer said, “you have to use the word ‘bullshit’ if the word ‘honor’ is going to have any meaning any more.” You know, if you don’t use the words, “bullshit” and “chicken-shit,” then honor is an empty word. Those guys who went through that shit have to be able to actually say, “fuck you, fuck me, you mother-fucking fuck.” The only way I can listen to you say that, is to walk in the room and be smarter and faster and meaner and crueler and more vulgar than anybody. So everyone takes a half a step back, and then he says, “but life is beautiful, isn’t it?” and then boom, boom, boom, or nobody is going to listen to you . . . Yeah, it’s vulgar. But I also think it has to do with the reality of theater. When you work in the theater, when you run a theater, when you sweep a floor . . .

 

NW:  When you clean the toilets . . .

 

JC:  When you clean the toilets, you wonder, “who are we kidding.” This is not a palace, this is not a dream place. This is a place of wood . . .

 

NW:  Of work!

 

JC:  And work, and sweat, and effort, especially when you have no money. There is nowhere to hide, so your body is there the whole time, you realize that this is the stuff we use to do this. Painters use paint and color. Writers use words. We use human fucking beings! And we use language and we use gesture, but we use human fucking beings and you are watching us do this. It’s absolutely vulgar, absolutely vulgar and that is the only way in the twenty-first century, after all we’ve been through you know, as a fucking society, as a people . . .

 

Overlord is Abu Ghraib man, it’s terrible, when we watch these beautiful young actors and watch them shackled, and then, led around. But if we don’t do that, then how are we ever going to talk about death, and how are we going to talk to anybody? It is as simple as that: how can I begin to speak to you and pretend to talk about anything of any worth to you, if I don’t address that. This is the reality that we have to speak of. Not just speak of it, not to point to it, to say, “therefore, US out of Iraq,” but to say, “that was dehumanizing. We have already been dehumanized by seeing those photos,” all of us. We took another step towards what we are capable of. Oh, God, that’s horrible. Yeah, it is, so lets keep talking about it, you know, “you would never do that, right? Let’s humanize ourselves again.” Woyzeck is even worse, where it’s going now, it’s just awful, but if we don’t keep that in the public eye constantly . . . I don’t know, I think Abu Ghraib and that level of carnality is not about being sublime. You have to honestly breath in the mess to get to the sublime.

 

AH:  So I understand you are working on a Monster Trilogy?

 

JC:  Yeah. The whole thing is called Kill the Zombies. Its Fatboy, Overlord, and Woyzeck.

 

AH:  Tell me about Woyzeck, are you doing that play or are you reworking it?

 

JC:  I’m reworking it, in the way that Fatboy is Ubu Roi. I’m probably going to call it, (and it’s better if you see the visual), [WWW.oyzeck.gov]. And he will probably still be Private Woyzeck, but other than that he is just an American soldier in Iraq. I am going to be a lot more aware of Woyzeck than I was of Ubu Roi. When the torture story broke, I grabbed all of that. I grabbed all of Chaney’s and Rumsfeld’s testimony or their responses, “is that torture? Well I don’t know, I’m not a doctor but . . . Is it legal? I’m not a lawyer, but . . . ” In Woyzeck, of course all of those characters are there. There is probably going to be The Officer, The Doctor, and The Professional. The Professional is the actual interrogator. There will be simulated torture. Woyzeck is tortured throughout the play and he is crushed and it ends in violence. I know that much is going to happen. I’m going to play with live music and video, and all sorts of crazy shit. I realized when I wrote Overlord, that it was the center of the Kill the Zombies trilogy, but I knew the next one was going to be this Woyzeck. The Kill the Zombies trilogy starts with Fatboy, which is Ubu Roi. It is sort of nineteenth century theater, first of all, I’m going to kill that. We are going to blow that shit up. And it’s also the zombies and . . .

 

AH:  Yes, who are these zombies?

 

JC:  Well yeah. The zombie thought process is the way we think. We are all the zombies. You have to kill that part of yourself that unquestionably follows, that is stumbling around. Right now, it could be your unquestioning faith in the goodness of America. It breaks my heart. I’m a very patriotic person. It could be your belief that people who are powerful are better than you, or whatever your thought system may be. 

 

Overlord is obviously direct. Overlord is kill the zombies of the American Theater. Eat them alive, kill them. Kill the drama, bring back the theater. Kill the page, bring back the stage. And Hans-Thies Lehmann’s point is that the theater reflects our understanding of history. There are good guys and there are bad guys. There are minor parts and bit parts, which can be the most dangerous. Who are the guys in Abu Ghraib, who are the Japanese civilians in the internment camps, who are the African Americans? We know they are there, but who is the hero that looks just like me? I want him to look like me, because I recognize him and I must be a good man.  Those are the zombie ways of behaving that have to be killed. It is a thematic trilogy because we need to kill those things that are dead and are walking around. Not because they are bad, not because they are old: they are dead and they are walking. That’s wrong. 

 

NW:  It’s scary.

 

JC: It’s scary. The other thing is that in every zombie movie there always comes a point when the hero, (it’s you mom, your dad, your grandpa, your girl friend or something) someone you love is now a zombie. If you love it and it’s a zombie, you have to kill it, because it’s not happy anymore, it’s not IT anymore, it’s not mom. The American Theater, which is this form that I love, fucking love, is dead. So it’s like, “I’m going to have to put you down.” 

 

You kill it, you bury it and then you let new things grow. You have to have blood flowing through your fucking veins if you are going to walk around. And that’s what is going on. It’s not the old stuff, you can’t blame Wilder or Miller or Shaw or those guys. You can’t, because that was living theater in their day. You can blame the young writers, who are writing this stuff, or artistic directors, or actors who are not really listening to each other and writers who are writing fourth-wall theater in the twenty-first century, in America. I’m sorry, but I’m going to do everything I can to stop you from doing it. But it’s not that I don’t like it. 

 

It’s very far from me not respecting the craft of doing that, I know how had that is. All I want you to do, everyone, when you are up there and you are writing or designing, directing, acting like this, all I want you to do is go like this, it’s a small adjustment, eyeballs out here for a second, and recognize that we are all in this room, this theater together. I just think it would be so much more interesting. I think you would be happier. And I want to say to writers, “look, you want to write fourth-wall stuff and make a living, write screen plays.” I’m writing screenplays now, there is nothing wrong with writing screen plays. I love movies and I love TV! But why on earth would you write a screenplay on stage? Why would you do that anymore?

 

AH:  But your plays are ultimately political.

 

JC:  Yes, that’s true . . . and all theater is political. Not that we are trying to beat you up with a political agenda . . . but to get to the point. It’s not who we vote for, it’s not who our boss is, it’s not capitalism. It’s how we think that is the problem. We have been trained to think a certain way and we are wired to give into egotism, to others, to phobia, to alpha males. It’s all just monkey brain . . . But if you can get to that, start a revolution inside your head, it becomes, “Oh! So that stranger over there in Darfur is as important as I am!” Then we are in a different place, then it doesn’t matter who you elect. I have enough respect for an audience member to say, “if you care about issues, if you care about politics, go work for a campaign, go to a rally, join Greenpeace.  What are you doing in theater?” This is a place about you and me and everyone else, not Bush. 

 

AH:  If you intend on killing our old way of thinking and ultimately to kill theater, who is your intended audience?

 

JC:  I always think of my sister or high school friends in St. Louis. Those guys were great and we laughed at the exact same things and listened to the same kind of music. I had the exact same upbringing as all my high school buddies. None of them went into the theater, so if I do a play and Dave Weems or Ted Corkery think that is the most pretentious piece of bullshit I ever did, then I am not actually really honoring me. How does John Clancy from St. Louis, Missouri, who is 44 years old, who loves fucking Meatloaf, (both the meal and the band) . . . How do I talk about the important shit; how do I get to create that place of wonder and of communion? How do I do that? How do we do that? We are trying to entertain. But how do you entertain without making it a commodity, without just making it another damn play? 

 

We started in the bars. So we started with an audience. We weren’t even inviting critics in. Its late night and we are doing this crazy shit. It was word of mouth. People would come back. One guy saw Solo for Spoon and Birdcage seven times, and brought friends with him. It’s great. So that was the original impulse, it was artist-audience, artist-audience. That is what was great about that. And when you begin to get it in your head, “I have a career in the arts, in America, in the twenty-first century,” a lot of people begin to crop up between you and that audience. Obviously the critic, the critic pops up and . . . we have been incredibly fortunate with critics, you know, by and large, certainly overseas, but here as well.

 

So I know it is always for the audience. But when you begin to have a career in the arts, you have to realize it’s about you and the audience and you don’t need anybody but you and the audience. The goal is, and we are starting to realize this, that you become critic-proof and you stop writing your work for the critics.

 

AH: A week or so ago, you mentioned that Fatboy was like a Ramones concert, you said about an hour of it was all you could take . . .

 

JC: It’s all Fatboy, it’s stupid, [laughing] TURN THAT SHIT OFF! Which was what the Chicago audience was saying, after eighty minuets. Which is fine, because I really laughed hard and I loved it but turn it off! I’m going to put it in the contract that the play must run in under eighty minutes. It really should be no longer than seventy-two minutes, but I’ll give a young company eighty, because it’s difficult. Most of the time, with people speaking that fast, they look at me and say, “John, I’m just rattling,” especially the Americana company. I remember Eva van Dok, she was having almost a break down. She was like, “you really want me to say it that fast?” I said, “I really want you to say it that fast.” So in anger she would say [gibberish].  I’d be like, “yeah, great! Now you have to do it as fast as you can and still make sense.”

 

AH: The incredible speed of Fatboy in Edinburgh helped the humor, but it seemed like the performers were in a rage . . .

 

JC:  Yes! Dude, we have so much rage, so much rage. It’s obvious, when you look at Fatboy. In the plays I am attracted to, everyone is just full fucking on, eyes bugged, spittle flying, attack, rage. Sometimes on yourself, like Cincinnati, sometimes just the trap we are in. Horse Country is just fucking rattling cages, just so we know they are there. You know, this is how we fucking think. We are structured to think this way. It has nothing to do with politics, it has nothing to do with anything else. It’s like, “shit, you know we have to name these things, we have to . . . ” So the rage is . . . it’s well, yeah, especially right now, it’s so depressing. I would love to write a beautiful play, but I don’t know and it is getting darker and darker.

 

NW:  You might.

 

JC: I might . . . but our work is getting darker and darker. Fatboy is mostly good-natured, it’s slap, tickle, slap, tickle . . . SLAP! It is still just a slap. It’s brutal, but it is still really just a kind of a slap. In Overlord, you know we are killing and eating the leads. We are killing and eating the people we ask you to identify with and then we are fucking around with them even more . . . what the fuck. That is just terrible. 

 

AH: It is defiantly darker than Fatboy . . . but you still have these monsters . . .

 

JC:  Yes, and there is still a whimsy to it, based on the little thing we did, it’s still fucking funny, because Paul Urcioli is one of the funniest mother fuckers alive, so still my collaborators are going to save me on a lot if this stuff. But Woyzeck is worse. It’s much worse, angrier. 

 

AH:  But isn’t Fatboy also saying that we need to take responsibility? We need to do things for ourselves because we are letting the institutions take responsibility for our lives?

 

JC:  That is what a lot of our work is about. That is what Fatboy is all about as well, Overlord, in a sense, but certainly Fatboy is just that: You are responsible, I’m responsible, we are responsible. You know, it is very convenient to be a child and let the adults, government officials, scientists, military, and your ancestors march along in their dusty, fucking graves and tell you what is right, what’s wrong, what’s possible, what’s impossible; what’s the definition of an art form. So there is a tremendous rage for me about willful ignorance. I don’t mind people who don’t know what’s going on. My neighbors, just about everyone who lives in this building are tired. They all work physical jobs, mother and father, they both work. They all have children that they have to look after. They are working class people. Not just working class, but the doctor in West Chester . . . I don’t mind if you don’t know what is going on, because you are tired and life is very hard in this country. But if you are willfully ignorant; if you are willfully saying, “I don’t want to know what is going on.” If you are willfully lying by saying something like, “we don’t torture,” and you know you are lying when you say that, it angers me.

 

NW:  That’s lazy.

 

JC:  That’s lazy, but it is also willfully fucking with me. Those are the people that I get crazy on. The ones that don’t know better, you have to come at them in a totally different way and say, “hey, maybe you didn’t know, but Jesus Christ, it’s right here.” It’s very different, I don’t have rage at ignorance, I actually don’t. I have rage at willfull ignorance. Ignorance is a fact. I’m ignorant of so many fucking things. 

 

AH:  Fatboy is fun and laughs and everything, but there is a lot of rage in that play.

 

JC:  Unbelievable . . . I had a weird position . . . You remember the first time we did Fatboy? I wrote it, in the fall of  2003. We had two producers on it. They said, “we love this, we are going to produce this in Edinburgh for you guys . . . ” It was a really busy year, we on some tour and then we went immediately to London. I had written it and put it aside. We flew out of London July 4^th and started rehearsals for Fatboy the next day. My point is, I had not really spent a lot of time thinking of this play. We did a reading in London about a week before we left, just so I could hear it again and get it in my head. I sat down with a bunch of people and said, “okay, we are going to do a reading,” and the writer was gone. I said to the cast, “I wrote this about nine months ago, so I’m going to treat this like it’s a script, like it was a text that we are going to figure out how to do it. And the rage is so deep and so over the top, that the fifth time I call you a cock-sucking fuck-head, seemed too much. So I said to everybody, “look, these aren’t insults, this is how they talk.” Its got to be zero emotion behind it or again, it gets stupid. Yes, the rage and the disdain and the murder and the attack is just the given circumstances. There is not even a reason for it. That is what it is. 

 

There is a great deal of religious imagery in that play that I didn’t think of. This is what is weird about the play. There is a complete acknowledgment and acceptance of God as the creator of all this and it is something that we will then kill or take over. It’s weird. It’s a very strange pantheon. It’s steeped in this sort of odd Catholic imagery. 

 

It’s rage man. It was personal rage. When I wrote it, we had invaded Afghanistan and I was astonished . . . But the beginning of it, the first seven pages of it were written as a . . . It was a shtick that Nan and I used to do when we were first married. Which was, “I’m a genius, I’m a writer.” “Go out and get money you fat bastard!” Total shtick, marriage shtick.

 

NW: He would say, “get me sausage,” and I would say, “we don’t have any sausage, you fat, wretched bastard.”

 

JC: Just shouting back and forth. But there is actually a great love between Fatboy and Fudgie. They need each other, they don’t really exist without each other. They are the only real people in the world. Everything else is a tool, a toy, an obstacle. They actually have to deal with each other. 

 

We did a reading of Fatboy in Philly for 1812 Productions, a couple of years ago. It was amazing, it was great. They wanted to do a reading of it, they were thinking about doing the show. We were in this little basement somewhere, and this old couple walks in . . .

 

NW:  Really, older.

 

JC:  Nice sweet old couple. They sit down in the front row and I thought, “oh, fuck, oh God.” They laughed at every fucking line. They howled. When it was done, I said to them, “I’m the author, and I’ve got to say that I really judged you when you came in, I was really afraid that you were going to hate it, that you would be offended.” And the woman starts sweetly, “well, I mean its marriage, isn’t it?” If you can laugh at Jackie Gleason, you can laugh at Fatboy. It’s the same thing. So that was great.

 

So I finished that section after Nan’s diagnosis. So the towers had fallen, my wife gets a fucking malignant brain tumor and we invaded Afghanistan. So, I was enraged at the world. The real impulse for Act Two of the play was Slobodan Milosevic. He was at The Hague. I will never forget it, he was eating a big, fucking hoagie and there is mayo all over his face. And my point was, look, we allow tyrants to be tyrants as long as they amuse us. As soon as they stop amusing us, or entertaining us, then we put them in jail and cut their heads off. Idi Amin was very entertaining, Slobodan was very entertaining, Mussolini was incredibly entertaining. So you can do whatever you want, as long as you kind of make us laugh. Why are we allowing these mother-fuckers to entertain us? Remember Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe Stalin? Crazy!

 

You know, I wrote that piece so quick. I really just pounded it out and then did one major revision, which was back in 2005 or six, when I fixed the third act. But rage, man rage. What the fuck is up with Overlord, you talk about rage. Great God man!

 

AH: Your shows tend to be short. Is that a recognition of what the audience is willing to tolerate or is it part of the necessity of doing a show at the Fringe?

 

JC:  When we do festival shows we are usually looking for around seventy-five minutes. Maybe seventy. That’s about enough time for you to make your point, get out of the way and move the audience on. But at the same time, if you really have something to say that takes two and a half hours, I can’t wait, I’m ready to listen to you. But dude, if you can say it in eighty, but you took another twenty minutes to point me over here, to show me some beautiful art and you took another twenty minutes to show me something over here, and I already knew what it was; now I’m angry at you. Because the world is just too busy, don’t you understand where we live, don’t you know what is really going on? There are a lot of things I have to pay attention to, so if you think I have two and a half hours to admire your beautiful work: fuck you, I don’t. If you have something that’s going to take you two and a half hours to really grab . . . I don’t know how long Charlie Victor Romeo is, but I would sit there every last moment, there wasn’t a thing to cut on that. Yeah, I need that. Black Watch, you need to take that much time. You need to take that time. I love you for that. That’s amazing. 

 

AH:  Okay, so you talk about connecting with the audience by getting rid of the fourth wall and you talk to the audience, but that can be intimidating. I always joke that I don’t want to get theater on me . . .

 

JC:  Yes, it can be intimidating. All of Hopkins’ work is about facing the audience. He described it as, I have to face you, even if it’s only two of you, God forbid, but I have to face you as a social body. So that gives me the authority to address us. Just like I’d say at a community board meeting, “I’ve been head of the community board for many years and I really feel that we cannot tear down this building.” So I’m not talking to you, but I do have to look at all of you as a group.

 

NW:  It’s sort of like making a speech.

 

JC:  It’s sort of like addressing a congregation.What I am responding to is this detour of Romanticism, where the artist, somehow, is better outside of the society, like the priest, and is somehow better by attacking society and being some sort of fucking child that brings back a vision and then dies of syphilis or some shit. Our job, especially in theater, is to be in the center of society, watching, talking, being a part of it, not separate from it and saying, now you guys come in, this is what we think you are saying and what we think the world looks like. This is what we think, “blah, blah, blah,” and then you say, “yes,” “no” or “whatever.” And like Shakespeare, like Moliere, like the Greeks and all the other great theater, like Brecht, you are right there, you are dealing with the rhythm and the tenor and the sounds and musicality of your society.

 

AH:  You also tend to work with many of the same people.

 

JC:  When I am looking at plays, a lot of the reason for me to say yes to it is because it has roles for all of these people I love working with. There is a real joy in that . . . And then, because of life history, because of everything that sort of happened probably starting with the attacks, when the towers fell, through to Nan’s [brain cancer], through the losses we had, with deaths in the family, and finally with the fire, that’s the latest thing, it’s kind of like, “ um, what’s the point, these theater awards are great, its great looking at them in the morning, it’s a great honor, but what won the best picture in 2005? Who the fuck knows? And that was three years ago. That doesn’t really mean anything. What will mean something is that Greg Kotis and I laughed really hard, when we were sitting around together. That is what’s important.

 

Talk about the ensemble, it was great, amazing ensemble work all these years. God it was so lucky. But for fifteen years, sixteen years on and off, we were not only able to work with some of the same people, but bring back a lot of the same work. Now there is a lot of new work coming out within the next couple of years, which is great. I feel, we all created that with Fatboy. I wrote it, I directed it, I’m usually the lead-artist. But when you work with people who have a lot of experience working together, not only do you work faster, but my work is so much easier, because it’s the same vocabulary that we share . . . I don’t know how we did this, but we shared some success early especially overseas – and that you begin to take it much more seriously.

 

One of the rallying cries nowadays is that we want to be “undeniable.” Clancy Productions, our work wants to be undeniable, so that it’s crystal clear. For me that was a great breakout for Fatboy, as a writer as well: let me pound this mother-fucker on the head for an hour, right on its fucking head. And then watch an audience love you for it.  To watch an audience say, “thank you . . .”  Some smart friends, other writers said, “thank you for taking a stand.” You know so much of the other work we see kind of alludes to this problem, but everyone is way too cool and careful to actually take a stand on an issue. There are issues in Fatboy that unequivocally say something, undeniable and with clarity.